Big Circle Gang

The Big Circle Gang is a Chinese triad that was founded in the 1950s. The triad has a communist structure, with the highest ranks being equivalent to Commanding Officer or Commissar; the gang was founded after Mao Zedong purged the Ultra-Left of the Communist Party of China in the early 1950s, killing 50,000 intellectuals and communists. Imprisoned leftists were kept in prisons surrounded by exclusion zones, and these zones were marked on maps by a large red circle. The anarchist and communist prisoners moved to Hong Kong, where they made contact with old Trotskyist party members, and they formed underground and secret societies in imitation of the Triads. The gang would control 50,000 people in Hong Kong and Guangzhou by its peak in the 1990s, and the Chinese government responded with the summary execution of prominent Big Circle members and the high-profile trials of its leadership. The gang would begin to traffick heroin into the United States, where it formed an alliance with the Tiny Rascal Gang. The gang was also allies with the Ghost Shadows and Wo Shing Wo, and it was enemies with the Bloods, Crips, and East Side Longos.